GRETNA, La. (AP) — Prosecutors say a Metairie man put his fatally injured father to bed and never checked on him again. Sheriff’s deputies found 81-year-old Leroy Adams’ skeleton curled in his bed more than two years later, after his daughter reported him missing in June 2008.
Lon Adams, 59, says his father died of natural causes. He told The Times-Picayune in July 2008 that grief and stress from Hurricane Katrina made him block out memory of the death and the upstairs bedroom where the body lay.
Jury selection in the second-degree murder case began Monday before 24th Judicial District Judge Conn Regan.
“Once all the facts are out, it will be crystal clear that my client did not kill his father,” defense attorney Joseph Raspanti said. “My client is innocent.”
Forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein at Louisiana State University and the coroner’s office found that several ribs and a neck bone were broken at or near the time Adams died of what they described as blunt-force trauma caused by “homicidal violence.”
Adams has been held at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center since Dec. 29, when prosecutors asked that he be jailed until the trial, fearing he would flee the state.
More than 30 witnesses have been subpoenaed.
They include next-door neighbors who told investigators that huge black flies covered the windows of the upstairs bedroom about a year before the remains were found.
The list also includes Adams’ sister, Lynne Landreneau, who filed the missing persons report June 3, 2008. She said that for more than two years, her brother had told her their father was asleep, too tired or too sick to receive visitors.
In the July 2008 interview, Lon Adams told the newspaper that his father had died of natural cases, possibly Alzheimer’s disease.
“He died. I couldn’t deal with it so I just left him there. I blocked it out of my mind. I was stressed out after Katrina. I just don’t know,” Adams said.
Adams, who worked as a project manager for 27 years with AT&T and retired from the Army Reserves as a lieutenant colonel after 28 years, called the actions completely out of character.
Adams told investigators he last remembered seeing his father alive in the “second quarter of 2006.” Asked how he could have ignored the rather distinctive smell of a decomposing body, Lon Adams said he basically blocked it out, court records said.
He told investigators that his father had fallen down the stairs of their two-story home at least twice, but each time seemed to be OK. During a hearing in January, Sgt. Don Meunier testified that Adams spoke of accidentally falling on his father’s neck while helping the elder Adams back into bed. Meunier told the court Adams didn’t know when his father died “because he never returned to the room.”
Adams pleaded innocent to the second-degree murder charge brought Jan. 8. A sanity evaluation declared him competent to stand trial and Regan rejected motions to suppress his statements to authorities.
Jancy Hoeffel, vice dean of academic affairs and a criminal law professor at Tulane University Law School, called the case an unusual one with room to doubt on both sides. But the verdict may turn on the how jurors conclude Leroy Adams’ bones were broken.
“The jury must decide the nature of the injuries themselves,” Hoeffel said.
 
—-Contact The Daily Reveille news staff at [email protected]